HP laptop hanging at iPXE initialising devices...

[ndogmail]

Hi All

Just compiled a fresh iPXE from scratch today using the git repository. Am using the undionly.kpxe and is working fantastic. I am using it to boot macbooks and macbook pros into our clonezilla PXE menu and imaging them over the network. Have tested in our building with a few acer servers and other machines which is working great.

One machine in particular is a HP laptop which gets stuck at the iPXE intialising devices. So far have not been able to get it booting with iPXE. If I want to boot it I use the gpxe undionly.kpe, which is working from it. However gpxe does not work with macbooks, so I have to keep changing back and forth.

Any chance you may take a look? Thanks. Would love to use iPXE only if possible.


Laptop: HP G42

Network card details: (from hdt)
Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd
RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller
PCI ID: 10ec:8136[103c:1426]

Error message:
Intel UNDI, PE-2.1 (build 083)
Copyright © 1997-2000 Intel Corporation
All rights reserved.

Patents blah blah ...

Realtek PCIe FE Family Controller Series v1.19 (08/10/09)

PXE->EB: !PXE at 9A7E:0070, entry point at 9A7E:0109
UNDI code segment 9A7E:1704, data segment 8CAC:DD20 (562-624kB)
UNDI device is PCI 03:00,0, type DIX+802.3
562kB free base memory after PXE unload
iPXE initialising devices...

[robinsmidsrod]

If you're using isc dhcpd you can setup a special host entry for that laptop that will override the generic one you have for all machines. And the name undionly.kpxe is not magical. You can rename it to ipxe-undionly.kpxe and gpxe-undionly.kpxe and use them side-by-side. With this you should have a workaround that allows you to keep everything working with a bit of more complexity in your DHCP setup.

What would be great is if you could do a git bisect, http://ipxe.org/howto/bisect, to try and find the commit that made your HP laptop unbootable. I would suggest you start with the gpxe/ipxe fork commit, which I believe is this one: 8406115 ([build] Rename gPXE to iPXE from 2010-04-19). It would be useful if you also send the information git bisect gives you to the mailing list, as some developers pay more attention to that one than the forums.

[jpwise]

ndogmail - if you're not in the position to try bisect'ing the git commits i might be able to try it if we get another G42 through the repair workshop - do you know the specific machine p/n of it, i'll check what other models used the same mainboard.

that said and slightly de-railing your original request - can you clarify on how you're ipxe booting the macbooks & macbook pros? are you dhcp/bdsp(netboot)'ing them or using a compiled iso on cd/dvd and using that to bootstrap them onto the pxe network? it's a problem i've been looking at periodically aswell and even attempting to do an efi version i still couldn't work around all the issues short of falling back on throwing a cd in to boot. :/

[ndogmail]

Hi everyone just closing this thread, sorry for late reply.

(2012-03-21 08:55)jpwise Wrote:  ndogmail - if you're not in the position to try bisect'ing the git commits i might be able to try it if we get another G42 through the repair workshop - do you know the specific machine p/n of it, i'll check what other models used the same mainboard.

Nowdays iPXE is compiling properly for the HP G42, thanks for the fix.

(2012-03-21 08:55)jpwise Wrote:  that said and slightly de-railing your original request - can you clarify on how you're ipxe booting the macbooks & macbook pros? are you dhcp/bdsp(netboot)'ing them or using a compiled iso on cd/dvd and using that to bootstrap them onto the pxe network? it's a problem i've been looking at periodically aswell and even attempting to do an efi version i still couldn't work around all the issues short of falling back on throwing a cd in to boot. :/

At the moment I am booting using the CD boot + iPXE. At some stage will try recompiling the EFI version of iPXE so I can boot from USB pen. It is slightly not needed anymore, since my original purpose was to boot clonezillla and push an image to a SMB share, since this is all possible from grub within the EFI grub.cfg file. But it would be cool to boot iPXE different ways, either USB pen or netboot method.

[jpwise]

Thanks for the reply. Also saw your response on the other thread so have replied there instead on the Netboot stuff to keep it on topic. Hopefully we may be able stir some interest there to see if anyone has ideas on 'network booting' ipxe with Macs.
http://forum.ipxe.org/showthread.php?tid=3729

Jp.